Are you game? Try the board variety this Saturday

Thursday

Mar 28, 2013 at 12:01 AMMar 28, 2013 at 1:06 PM

Grab your dice, order the pizza and shuffle the cards. Saturday is International TableTop Day.

C. A. BridgesStaff writer

Grab your dice, order the pizza and shuffle the cards. Saturday is International TableTop Day, when over 2,250 public events at game stores, libraries and coffee shops in 55 countries around the world will celebrate the kinds of games that don't plug in. Think of it as a worldwide Game Night.

Internet masters Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day, co-creators of the popular show "TableTop" on the YouTube channel Geek & Sundry, created the event to share their love of games and to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the show. In each episode Wheaton, of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "The Big Bang Theory" fame, plays against his friends and family. The result is something like a funnier-but-no-less-competitive "Celebrity Poker."

It helped that Wheaton's friends tend to be fellow actors, comedians, and game designers. Grant Imahara ("Mythbusters"), Colin Fergusen ("Eureka"), Kevin Sussman ("The Big Bang Theory") and many more took on popular games such as "Small World," "Settlers of Catan" and "Ticket to Ride."

Board game sales already were on the rise, surging in 2008 to nearly $800 million in the U.S.. As Wheaton told a crowd at MegaCon recently in Orlando, "I love it but I can't take credit for it. You were all already out there, playing. We just showed people how much fun it was."

Charles "Twitch" Schutt, who runs game nights at Cloak & Dagger Comics in Ormond Beach, agrees. "We're here every Saturday, always a good crowd," he said. He runs game nights there several times a week, plus monthly big events.

Why the interest in cardboard, plastic and pencils in a wireless world? The economy may have helped, as familes hoping to scale back their entertainment expenses found that a $20 board game beat a $60 video game. But many people have found a renewed interest in games you play face to face.

"One father told me that his tween kids spent every evening in front of their own computers or televisions," Wheaton said on his blog, "and after dinner he pretty much didn't see his family until breakfast. But after watching Tabletop together, the kids were inspired to start a family game night. Tabletop, he told me, literally brought his family closer together."

"It's not the same as when you're home alone on the XBox," Schutt said. "You can go out with your friends, have some drinks, play a game and talk while you play."

Choosing your game may be daunting. There are fast games and slow ones, games where you cooperate with each other and games where backstabbing is the only way to succeed, complicated endeavors and games with very few rules at all. You can build kingdoms or settlements, battle zombies, go into space, battle elder gods, create elder gods, solve puzzles, or just test your wits against your opponents, with new games coming out all the time.

"'Munchkins,' 'Ascension,' people love games like that," Schutt said. "Target and Barnes & Noble both have big games sections now, you didn't use to see that."

Don't have an event near you? "Make one yourself," says Day in her video announcing the event. "Whether it's just in your home, you convince a local coffee shop to host one, or, I don't know, you turn a gymnasium into a giant chess board. Your imagination's the limit."

"Tabletop," which has been renewed for a second season starting April 4, will be streaming a show live Saturday with Wheaton, Day, Imahara and other guests. You can search for events and get tips on games to try at tabletopday.com . Participants are urged to use #tabletopday in their preferred social media to spread the word.

Cloak & Dagger Comics will be holding a TableTop Day event from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, but really it'll be business as usual.